Two new problems on the 4.0.2 branch ... Ouch. Had to make 2
backports from 4.0.3. The frist was okey, once it was
already integrated on the tree. The second was a little
worst, once it will be integrated in the next few days
(which scared the hell outta me, but seens to be working
...)

Conectiva

Boy, we are selling. Conectiva Linux 7.0 is breaking all our
records. People is simply loving it. That really gives a
warms felling, you know ... Knowing something you helped
developing is such a huge success.
On the service front, I just finished a very insteresting
maintance today. Looks like Cyclades PC300 ifup scripts are
bogus. Ouch. Still need to confirm with them that the
problem is not corrected yet, but that looks like the case.
If someone from Cyclades involved on this reads this,
please, drop me an e-mail.

Cable

Ouch. Spent most of this morning having up to 98% packet
loss on my cable connection. WTF ?!? Can't this people do
things right ? At least my IPv6 tunnel is working, but I
don't count that as a great winning.
Oh, btw, I discovered they are not enforcing that link quota
after all. So, I can download/upload as much as I want,
without having to worry about having to pay any extra.

This was a sleepless weekend.
Oh buy, CodeRed II is hitting hard. Not that I use Windows,
but it's eating up my bandwidth. And you know what is even
worst ? My cable provider charges me if I use it too much (I
have a 4GB/month quota).
Of course, I have send a <sarcams>nice
little</sarcasm> letter to my cable provider, but
don't know if it will help.
Anyway, CodeRed II is a pain, no matter if you use Windows
(in which case, you already have lots of other problems) or
not. I'm getting 10+ hits an hour only from my cable modem
provider backbone (80/tcp is blocked from the outside). I
can only imagine what other people without these filters are
getting hit by. And no, I'm not defending this kind of
filters. They suck...
Current statistics for the last 40 hours: 195 hits from 39
unique IPs (with the hit rate rising pretty fast)

Actualy, I'm getting pretty sick of my cable provider (which
is Virtua, if any of
you want to know). They pretty much stinks. Filters all
around, transfer quotas, high prices, slow. Not considering,
of course, that they take at least a full week to answer any
e-mail you send them, and that their support phone line only
works from 6am to midnight.
The problem is that I don't have any other choice. ADSL here
is if anything worst (you have to access one specifig
homepage before being allowed to use it), and even more
pricy. I'm simply are lost here. It's a plain abuse to
charge something like US$35/month for a 128K connection,
where you can get (with luck) transfer rates like 10Kbps
(the average is little better then 5Kbps).
Well, thats enough ranting for today.

Well, things are getting a little better here.
First, my IPv6 connection is up and running. Now, I only
need to find out how laforge managed to
make apache 1.3.19 bind to IPv6 addresses, and I'll be a
happy person. The best part of it is that I managed to get
my cable provider to remove some filters they had had in
place that prevented the IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel to work
(ip-proto-41). And it only took me 3 weeks to make they
understand what I was talking about lol ...

Also, things at work are improving. I'm managing to get some
companies and schools to partner with Conectiva for Linux
software development. All we need now is to get the
partnership contract (or whatever other form it takes) done,
so we can start working. I'm accepting sugestions about
softwares to assign development to them.
Oh, almost forgot ... My new credit card just arrived, so I
managed to order some books. Amazing enough, Amazon still
have the best prices on the books I usualy buy.
I just received a letter from my ISP (in Brazil, you have to
subscribe to an ISP plus the Cable provider... ouch) telling
I can get a copy of WinXP for only R$ 29,90 a month (about
US$12.50). Lol ... Really funny. I'm just entertaining an
idea about writing to tell them that they can get a copy of
Linux for only R$ 0.00 a month, but I'm afraid they will not
know that I'm taking about. It's amazing how stupid people
can be sometimes.

Ouch. Things have been so chaotic lately that I simply had
no time to post anything here.
Well well, lost of things have happened, both on personal
and professional basis
First, my fiance finaly got a job at Conectiva. She is taking
care of our training centers on Minas Gerais, but hopefully
someday in the near future she will be up to advogato
:-)
Lemme see, I have been working on a set of filters so
procmail can filter the SirCam worm. If anyone wants it:

Well, I'm back coding. Well, almost. I'm taking a good look
at my
projects source code, to chcek that I have not forgotten
anything important :-) They have been on hold for so long,
that I'm not sure they are as ok as I suppose.
Thursday I'll be taking a trip to Campinas to install a
Firewall. Cross your fingers for me, once I'll be installing
it using Conectiva Linux 7.0 BETA ! Yes, I know I should not
be using it, but it's a developing network, and no other
version of CL works very well with kernel 2.4 (and they need
stateful package analysis). Will report here how it
worked.
On the buggy side of the world, I just found out that
xinetd, then compiled with IPv6 support, crashed on linux
unless I have the ipv6 module loaded. This is just plain
wrong. I guess I'll have to make a patch for it, if they
don't work fast :-)

Well, one more unslept night, one more sleepy day ... I
should be sleeping a little more. 4 hours a night is really
not enough.
Anyway, today promisses to be a samewhat boring day ... unf
...
This afternoon, I have to whatover some peolpe taking
certification tests
this afternoon. Quite boring. Have to stay sitted on a chair
for an hour and a half, without doing anything, while some
grownups keep trying to figure out why they haven't studided
a little more.

I finaly managed to upgrade my coworkers machine to CL 7.0
(with kernel 2.4) while she is tarveling :-) Hope she likes
the surprise. I know that after I started using kernel 2.4,
going back to 2.2 is a nightmare (what can I say, iptables
is so much better then ipchains ...).

Lunch time ... I'm really hungry, and my wife is waiting for
me with the food on the table.

... some time later...
Well, things have gone pretty well. Not only the guy passed
the certification test (he finished it in about 40 minutes,
thanks god), but he also told me his company wants to ship
Conectiva Linux with their product. It's was not a bad
day.

First, I'm not living in Curitiba anymore. Now, I work at
Belo Horizonte. And no, I have not left Conectiva.
The catch is that now I'm no longer a full time developer.
Now I have to share my time between development, consultant
and linux advocacy. The good news is that now I get paid
also for being a Linux Advocate !
What more can I say ... humm, let me see ... it has been so
long ...

Oh, yes. I have reviewed the certifications I granted here
at advogato. The reason, I have certificated sone persons I
don't know enough. I don't remember having changed any
certifications. I only removed a few.

Humm, just noticed one of my last posts mentioned I was
trying to get a Palm Handheld. Well, I got one (Palm M100).
Not a ferrari, but I does what I paid it for. So I have no
regrets.

I have not had much time to code these days. Well, what you
want, with me moving towns and all that stuff. I hope to get
back coding in the next few weeks. Things are almost settled
now.

Well, back on the xmlrpc biz.Jeff gave me an argument that I
could not counter. HTTP is
the prefered protocol couse it's one of the few things open
in firewalls nowadays. Unfortunatly, it's true. And if we
must use http, I don't see why we should not use xmlrpc. At
least somewhat flexible.
So, I coded a simple proof-of-concept server for Jeff. He is
showing it to some people. Hope they like it. :-)

On a side note, I'm looking around to buy a Palm. My
prefered model is the CHEAP one :-) If you have one of
those, please, drop me a line :-)

Ouch, too much work here. And the weekend, of course.
I have been talking with Jeff (RPM
maintainer) about a few
features
for RPM, and now I have a full workload of things to do :-)
I'm even stuck with a thing called xmlrpc. I have one word
for it: blounted.
Why, a "generic" protocol (please mark well the quotes),
based on HTTP and XML ?!?!?! That is what I call big
overhead. And why that ? Only couse XML and other things
like that (CORBA etc) are "Business Oriented" blah blah blah
marketing blah blah blah customer care blah blah proactive
blah blah ?!?!?! I'm seriously thinking about droping all
this stuff. I simply can't agree with a thing like that,
using a blounted protocol implementation, only couse it's
'nice' (and a whole lot of other marketing oriented
arguments).
I know it's not Jeff's fault. Looks like he just have some
Pointy Haired Bosses.